Property owners across the Commonwealth will once again pay just over 12 cents for every 100 dollars in land value. So, a homeowner with a 100-thousand dollar house would pay 120-dollars in property tax next year. The property tax rate is set by the State Department of Revenue and Policy Advisor Tom Crawford says that tax rate’s been constant for several years.

“The last four or five years, the state rate has remained the same because we have entered a period of time where real property values were flat or in some counties very slowly increasing and in other counties we actually had some assessment decreases. So, overall, the real property assessments have not increased by anywhere near to four percent in the last four or five years,” said Crawford.

If the general assembly has a problem with the new rate, Tom Crawford with the State Department of Revenue says it can intervene.

“The general assembly has had proposals in prior years to freeze the rate or set it at some particular level or rate. There would be no recalculation of it in future years, but those have not passed, but that is certainly a possibility,” added Crawford.

The state’s property tax rate is expected to generate about 250 million dollars. It’s still far below what’s brought in by the state’s income and sales taxes. The property tax represents about four to five percent of the money pumped into Kentucky’s general fund.